Word: poem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...right balance between religion and reality, between the glory of the next life and the hardships of this one. When she does find this balance, Mora's words achieve a beauty that matches and often even surpasses that seen in the religious art on which she bases every poem. In "The Guardian Angels" she writes "In these hills,/the houses of glowing adobe/like rounded loaves,/like sliding but also rising,/the clear gold of wild grasses,/of swirling pollen,/of frog eyes humming." It is in passages like this that the intensity of the faith Mora is exploring, the power...
GIRLS ON THE RUN: A POEM By John Ashbery Farrar, Straus and Giroux...
...long poem with Edenic ambitions, Ashbery's latest work is based on a 19,000 page illustrated novel by the late recluse Henry Darger. By the time he died in 1972, Darger had produced an opus of lolli-comic girls, The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, in which Peggy and friends are chased about by storms and sundry tormenters. These girls reappear in Girls on the Run, running about with a most coherant inexplicability...
Indeed, the poem is really accessible only at the emotional, abstract levels. "Understanding" this work would require a conceit of the reader that, I think, has gone out of style in all but the most responsible circles. Each sentence, at least, for readers with stretchier imaginations, does manage to stand on its own--it is the sentence that follows which makes no sense. While each stanza begins with a hint a plot (at times reassuringly contained in quotation marks), its thread is soon lost in a stream of inside-joke-like surreality, such that one imagines the Vivians must...
...delicious piece on Ashbery's cover is credited to a gallery in Lausanne. Still, on its own pre-pubescent feet Girls on the Run is a wonder, combining dead-pan modernist language with the poignancy of a concrete burn on a Sunday afternoon. Reading the entire 55-page poem through is akin to sitting through a ten hour film, and Girls on the Run features an additional hypnotism in the person of its girls. Shuffles shuffles, Judy suggests and Tidbit agrees: plunky spunkiness speaks through childish seriousness as planes fly overhead and the storm breaks. We should congratulate Ashbery...